Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming

to you from the QI offices in Covern Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with Andy Murray, James Harkin, and Anna Chazinski.

And once again we have gathered around the microphone with our four favorite facts from

the last seven days and in a particular order, here we go, starting with Andy.

My fact is that fish who work as cleaners can cheat their bosses and their bosses can

punish them.

So this is incredible.

There are fish, as I'm sure you know, who clean other fish as in they eat parasites

from the skin.

So you get cleaner fish and client fish is what they're technically known as.

And there have been lots of studies of this, especially by this amazing sounding ecologist

called Reduand Bicherry.

I hope I'm pronouncing his name right, who has studied these guys so much.

And basically the trade is for food versus clean skin.

But the cleaner fish they sometimes cheat because they actually like eating the thick mucus

that covers the client fish as a protective layer and they often have a cheeky bite of

it instead of eating a parasite.

And that makes the client fish jump, I guess, in pain.

So that's them cheating it and then their bosses, the client fish punish them by chasing

them around.

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